http://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/re/2004/c/pages/fear_of_hell.html

Fear of Hell Might Fire Up the Economy

July 29, 2004

Editor’s Note: Below is a new version of this article, which discusses recent research in economics regarding a possible relationship between economic growth and religion. It is the second revision that has been posted. In both the original version and the first revision, the article ended with a discussion of simple correlations between countries’ religiosity, levels of corruption and per capita incomes. The purpose of these discussions was to use a very simple framework to illustrate the results found in the literature. Because the discussion did not go any deeper than simple correlations, it was never intended to be a substitute for serious statistical analysis.

Thanks to the keen eyes of a number of readers, however, we have discovered that the charts used in both of these versions of the article contained errors. Consequently, the version below does not include discussions of the correlations between religiosity, corruption and per capita income. It is important to note that this has no bearing on the results in the literature that are discussed in the article. It is not uncommon, for example, for simple correlations between two variables to provide different answers from regressions that control for a longer list of variables.

I would like to apologize to any of our readers who have been inconvenienced by this series of corrections. In addition, I would like to thank all of those who picked up on the errors and let us know about them.

(article follows at site)